|
I think, therefore, that those ancient sages, who sought to
secure the presence of divine beings by the erection of shrines
and statues, showed insight into the nature of the All; they
perceived that, though this Soul is everywhere tractable, its
presence will be secured all the more readily when an appropriate
receptacle is elaborated, a place especially capable of receiving
some portion or phase of it, something reproducing it, or
representing it, and serving like a mirror to catch an image of
it.
It belongs to the nature of the All to make its entire content
reproduce, most felicitously, the Reason-Principles in which it
participates; every particular thing is the image within matter
of a Reason-Principle which itself images a pre-material
Reason-Principle: thus every particular entity is linked to that
Divine Being in whose likeness it is made, the divine principle
which the soul contemplated and contained in the act of each
creation. Such mediation and representation there must have been
since it was equally impossible for the created to be without
share in the Supreme, and for the Supreme to descend into the
created.
The Intellectual-Principle in the Supreme has ever been the sun
of that sphere- let us accept that as the type of the creative
Logos- and immediately upon it follows the Soul depending from
it, stationary Soul from stationary Intelligence. But the Soul
borders also upon the sun of this sphere, and it becomes the
medium by which all is linked to the overworld; it plays the part
of an interpreter between what emanates from that sphere down to
this lower universe, and what rises- as far as, through soul,
anything can- from the lower to the highest.
Nothing, in fact, is far away from anything; things are not
remote: there is, no doubt, the aloofness of difference and of
mingled natures as against the unmingled; but selfhood has
nothing to do with spatial position, and in unity itself there
may still be distinction.
These Beings [the Reason-Principles of this sphere] are divine in
virtue of cleaving to the Supreme, because, by the medium of the
Soul thought of as descending they remain linked with the Primal
Soul, and through it are veritably what they are called and
possess the vision of the Intellectual Principle, the single
object of contemplation to that soul in which they have their
being.
|
|